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I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.

Philip Roth

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Philip Roth
Age: 85 †
Born: 1933
Born: March 18
Died: 2018
Died: May 22
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Philip Milton Roth
Recklessly
Solemnly
Correct
Serious
Natural
Seemly
Even
Blissfully
Unspeakably
Savory

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Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.
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I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.
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What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.
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A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.
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I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.
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And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.
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He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
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You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.
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There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.
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Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
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I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
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--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
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At a certain stage of misery, you'll try anything to explain what's going on with you, even if you know it doesn't explain a thing and it's one failed explanation after another.
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One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.
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Let's hope the first comes first.
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When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.
Philip Roth
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My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets — no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
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Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't to phrase them was to invent them and own them.
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World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out loner who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.
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I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, Is he as crazy as I am? I don’t need that question answered.
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